December 12, 2003
DON'T BOTHER ME:
Shut Up, They Explained (Paul J. Cella III, 12/12/2003, American Spectator)
An interesting and horrifying thing happened this Wednesday. The United States Supreme Court modified key portions of the First Amendment to the Constitution, and few citizens took notice. Admittedly, those portions include such minor and ambiguous clauses as "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech" and "Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." According to the Court, Congress may indeed abridge these freedoms, even in the context that the authors of the Constitution specifically had in mind when the Amendment was passed: namely, politics. [...][C]all me crazy but I maintain that legislation so brazenly in violation of the clear intent of the Constitution is grounds for the impeachment of a judge or executive, and the censure and democratic removal of a legislator. Were this a healthy republic of men jealous of their liberty, these would be our tools to rebuke that creeping despotism which is peculiar to democracies, and which the great French diagnostician of politics Alexis de Tocqueville described with astonishing prescience:
It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
The justification for this law's passage by the Legislature, and acceptance by Executive and Judiciary is so thin, and the outcry against it so muted and mild, that one is inclined to conclude that Tocqueville's nightmare is becoming our reality.
It's a really interesting phenomenon going on right now, in the area of political ads, spam, phone solicitations, we're basically willing to gut the First Amendment just to get rid of a few annoyances. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 12, 2003 11:01 PM
"I maintain that legislation so brazenly in violation of the clear intent of the Constitution is grounds for the impeachment of a judge or executive, and the censure and democratic removal of a legislator. Were this a healthy republic of men jealous of their liberty, these would be our tools to rebuke that creeping despotism"
So he doesn't favor tarring and feathering them and running them out of town on a fence rail. Coward.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at December 13, 2003 12:06 AMAnd what does one do about this outrage? Complain to the elected representatives? Who have tried ever harder to ensconce themselves in office through this blaspheme against the Constitution? Complain to the arrogant unelected nine (five), who now have a fancy for dabbling in international law, over and above the supreme law of the land?
All I can figure to do is to tell my kids not to believe their teachers when they reach the Constitution in history class.
Posted by: jsmith at December 13, 2003 12:19 AMWe could start with a small step: Impeach the most egregious judge on the Ninth Circuit Court in California. Everyone with any common sense knows that those guys are the most frenzied and foolhardy of judicial despots, plus Congress has impeachment power over them.
I submit that the impeachment and removal of merely a single federal judge, seeing as how such an action would provoke intense media coverage, would have a dramatic effect on the wider phenomenon of judicial usurpation.
Posted by: Paul Cella at December 13, 2003 8:01 AMTell it to Alcee Hastings...
Posted by: oj at December 13, 2003 8:50 AMYou disagree, OJ? I admit I may be unduly optimistic about this, but it sure would be fun.
Posted by: Paul Cella at December 13, 2003 10:40 AMRulers get very nervous when the people express their desire to remove one of their number.
Posted by: oj at December 13, 2003 11:42 AMThe courts will not listen until some President or Majority Leader says what Andrew Jackson said: "Mr. Marshall has made his opinion - let him enforce it!"
But any President willing to do it would have to have 100 times the gravity of Roy Moore, and the certainty of a Bill Clinton that Congress will not remove him. Even what Roosevelt tried to do in 1937 split his party.
Posted by: jim hamlen at December 13, 2003 9:40 PMimpeachment is to good for them. I say give them a fair trial and then hang them.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at December 14, 2003 5:25 PM